Fortunately, and thankfully, I got to spend a majority of the time allotted this career with a lady who also didn’t grow up and also never wanted to grow up. We’ve had a good time. We had fun. We’re still having fun.

At the appointed time, necessities become ripe. That is the time when the Creative Spirit (which one can also designate as the Abstract Spirit) finds an avenue to the soul, later to other souls, and causes a yearning, an inner urge.

This yearning — this inner urge — acquires the power to create in the human spirit a new value which, consciously or unconsciously, begins to live in the human being.   From this moment on, consciously or unconsciously, the human being seeks to find a material form for the new value, which already lives within him in spiritual form.

In this process, the spiritual value, searching for a form of materialization, finds matter. Matter is merely a storeroom.  It is from this storeroom, that the spirit chooses what is specifically necessary for it to reveal itself — just as a cook chooses what he needs from a pantry.

Wassily Kandinsky
Über die Formfrage
Der Blaue Reiter, 1912

When prosecutors will not prosecute, who prosecutes the prosecutors? Seems to me there are RICO actions, at least civil, in there somewhere, against prosecutors, mayors, councils, police chiefs, judges. There are also more direct ways to scare the bejeezus out of someone so they execute on their job description.

Keep in mind as archetype, however, that Pharaoh, once the plagues had passed, went right back to persecuting the sons of Jacob.

Governance is more about taking out garbage than it is about adding programs or solving problems. The garbage is the problem. Get rid of the garbage and problems cease to exist.

We say and they say that they are Progressives, but I do not see that they are. Woodrow Wilson would not have countenanced what today’s Progressives are doing. Nor would Karl Marx. Not even Bill Clinton would, at least not as much as is happening. What’s coming out of these people is anarchy, not political Progressivism as that term is customarily used. Anarchy has two main sources: drugs and bedlams, which are really inverse and obverse of the same coin. Where addicts and insane take over streets, and buildings, I guarantee you the people with responsibility for those areas are smoking marijuana and snorting cocaine and thus uninterested in discharging and unable to discharge their responsibilities. They do not see garbage as garbage because they are the garbage to be taken out.

“The Fundamental Issue of Our Time.” I would have answered: loss of faith in God, aka loss of self-confidence. Thompson’s long essay answers: political / cultural battle over who educates the children and owns the family, parents or government? He does not even mention children being responsible for their own education and sharing ownership of their family.

To the Q, who owns / educates children, parents or government, I say: neither. The child is responsible for their own education, which they are doing from conception to death. Parents and teachers are servants of children. The student is the one in charge of their own education. This phenomenon never varies and cannot be changed. Thompson’s analysis is trivial and his prognosis is superficial.

Fortunately, leftists and perverts generally make very bad physicists. They do not grasp, do not want to grasp, that existence is participatory and indeterminate. This fun facts grieves leftists and other perverts. The goal is to nurture nature.

We are at a remarkable juncture of history. Lawyers, medical doctors, theologians, soldiers . . . none of these critically important professions now has a top guidance body that is not polluted with subversion of their own raison d’être. Who’s taking out the garbage?

The phrase political continuum is ringing hollow to me. I just don’t see one. I see people who used to go by the idea of thesis, antithesis, synthesis and are still wishing they could but know they cannot. I see people who used to go by the idea of synthesis now going by the idea of diastasis, separation hard, fast, and deep, with intent to annihilate all other parties, quite literally. There isn’t a continuum in that situation that I can see, unless I am blind to something, which is entirely possible.

Furthermore, I feel need to go by a fresh metaphor for personal, group, and national relations, one more accurate — livable — than either synthesis or diastasis. I am going to go with the idea of correlation among asymptotic ratios such as pi and phi. I think correlation of givens made dynamic by their asymptotic relationships goes better for organizing life and thought than either synthesis or diastasis do. In any case, in current conditions I am not seeing a political continuum unless it be among saints and sages.

In days of old, when one said Arizona State University did this or that, one meant faculty there did this or that. Now, when one says Arizona State University does this or that, one means administrators there do this or that.

In both cases, the way one would speak of the institution reflects its reality. Therefore, I would say, Arizona State University is no university at all, and anyone resident there in any capacity is engaged in something other than education.

If a school is not its faculty, it is not a school, and one is well met not going there to learn anything.

When one says “Yale should [do this or that].” who does one mean, faculty or administrators? If administrators, why waste time saying what Yale should or should not do? If Yale is administrators, it is not a school, so why pay any attention to Yale as if it is one?

Robert Theobald and his wife Jean Scott were thinking and writing about these matters in the 1960s and beyond. They worked very hard at it. Their diagnostic sensibilities were advanced for the times. Their treatments for problem / possibilities, as Bob called them, avoided the vertical dimension of existence and so always came short of practicality and effectiveness. In parallel with Friedman, Bob and Jean proposed guaranteed income as at least partial response to poverty induced by automation. In those years — 60s-70s — they did not foresee offshoring. Missing from their protocols, as mentioned, was the vertical dimension, the theological component. They tried to integrate it with their labors between 1968 and 1971 but finally rejected it as “unbelievable.” One of Bob’s grandparents had been a bishop of the Church of England. Jean was a brilliant, feisty, and head-turning Scot. Bob himself was born in India and always regarded himself as British Indian. He got into it with Galbraith over the latter’s sententious treatment of Indians at Harvard.

Jay
I think it fundamentally goes to Social Security and welfare. Before the concept of income-for-life for our elders (full disclosure – that now includes myself), people depended on their children to help and support them in old age. SS moved elder support from family to the State, and thus children economically are expendable. It was the start of the socialist destruction of the family.

gozur88 to Jay
I agree with this, and would add that it also stems somewhat from the move away from agricultural employment. When you’re running a farm, children are an economic asset – you can have them milking cows, feeding chickens, chasing down stray animals, etc. The additional cost of each child is small, since it mostly involves food, which you have in abundance. My maternal great grandmothers were farmers and had a total of nineteen children between them. My maternal grandmother moved to the city and had one child.

So when 90% of your population is agricultural, as it was at the turn of the 20th century, there’s every incentive to have larger population. Today it’s at something like 3%. There are reasons to have children, but the economics have moved into the negative for the vast majority of us.

David R. Graham to gozur88
There is definitely that. Also, there is that goods and services abundance is now easy to produce with very little direct human input. The Industrial Revolution succeeded in bringing prosperity to all, at least in principle. That completed a phase of history. I think the new phase of history, which we straddle into time-wise, focuses on protecting that abundance. This amounts to a new era of history. I think it is accurately denotable as a Mother Era.

Yes. Not costs. Prosperity is now universal, at least in principle. Very few can feed, clothe, medicate, and shelter very many. The Industrial Era’s goal of prosperity is a mission accomplished. An Era of history has ended. A new one is commencing. The goal of this new one is protecting the universal prosperity that has been achieved. This requires a fresh mind-set, stochastic structure, tuned to protection rather than production. I call it the Mother Era.

All mundane wealth is in dirt. There is also wealth in what might be called the vertical dimension of life. I think we have one foot in a closing era of history (Industry, Production) and one foot in an opening era of history (Inspiration, Protection).

Districts are pretty desperate to have teachers working. Who normal would want to? There are so many reasons to avoid being a public school teacher. So the districts take what they can get. Plenty of perverts are available for the job. The same is true, ever more poignantly over time, of colleges and universities since about 1971, although until lately it was considered gauche to say so. The answer is, homeschool and labor to have state and local ed funding assigned directly to students rather than to teachers and admins.

Ah, perhaps, or partly that. I think it’s much more than that, however. I think CIA has used them per plan and is now done with the both of them. CIA are in the thick of engineering a new installation, probably sooner than later, under color of the appearance of demand for a savior against all these social and economic problems CIA engineered to justify their engineering a new installation at the Oval Office, one under direct orders to ignore entirely Congress and the Courts. I think CIA have grown impatient and are going for the gold ring, so to speak, of autocratic governance. This would put them in position to execute pretty much unhindered on post-national re-wiring of global comms. We’ll see who they have in mind as their strong man. I would guess a European or Middle Easterner, somebody from Italy or Libya, perhaps. Another guess, based on trial balloons flying everywhere: Pete Buttigieg.

Steven Fletcher
I don’t think it was overreach that cost the Republican’s there majority in 2018. Quite the opposite in fact. The same holds for 2006. At least, that’s my interpretation of all that talk about teaching the Republicans a lesson.

David R. Graham to Steven Fletcher
Concur. It was Rs agreeing with Ds as a UniParty working for an array of non-American interests, principally Chamber of Commerce, Middle Eastern, and CCP. The Rs who did that are being pushed out of the party calling themselves R. So, Rs today are not Rs of even just four years ago. Rs today are more and increasingly just the Americans who want the borders intact and orderly, the phones working, cars and roads that work, dependable power, clean food and water, and safe, working sewers. Everyone knows that big-spending programs are a coalition of the rich and the lazy to loot the normal.

The borders intact and order is the real gut issue. Lewandowski said this back in 2016: the issue is national government or global governance. Americans are for national government. Global governance is being pushed on Americans from the outside: from CIA, from occupied Oval Office, from illegitimate judges, from seditious members of congress, from Switzerland and Great Britain, from the PRC, from Afghanistan and Italy.